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Animal Stocking under Conditions of Declining Forage Nutrients
Author(s) -
Huffaker Ray G.,
Wilen James E.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
american journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.949
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1467-8276
pISSN - 0002-9092
DOI - 10.2307/1242449
Subject(s) - stocking , forage , grazing , nutrient , stocking rate , yield (engineering) , range (aeronautics) , environmental science , agronomy , biology , zoology , ecology , engineering , materials science , metallurgy , aerospace engineering
This paper examines the bioeconomic conditions under which the recently popular intensive‐early‐stocking (IES) strategy outperforms the conventional season‐long‐stocking (SLS) strategy as a response to the deterioration of forage nutrients over the latter stages of the grazing season. The economic performances of the IES and SLS strategies are compared to a dynamically optimal grazing policy that continually fine tunes stocking rates to account for declining forage nutrients. The comparisons yield a range of qualitative properties under which the IES strategy tends to approximate better the optimal strategy, some of which are investigated in a numerical illustration.